Allie's War Season One (15 page)

It becomes clearer as images around me flash in negative...then the Pyramid is everywhere, all around us. Its silver threads shine like bright wires in rose-lit clouds. Tarnished silver entangles the lights of people I can see around us on the sleepy Washington street.

Red eyes surround me, bodies made of wire...

Laughter brings my own gaze higher.

A face hovers below the Pyramid, and I recognize it as a ghostly version of the man from Golden Gate Park. His face morphs in Barrier wind, distorted by silver light. There is symmetry to those flickers of light, though, like film stuttering in a projector. The Pyramid’s shifting cells split and reconfigure, moving on gliding rails like a carnival fun house, and I feel sick from the motion. I feel both out of control and strangely suffocated under that crushing weight as it strangles my light, fighting to insert itself deeper into my mind.

I see you! Pretty bird! Do you know who carries you on such swift wings?

I feel my chest clench.

My mother calls me her bird. She has since I was a kid.

I feel Revik again, his arms around me, the steady beating in his chest. No one has ever felt so much like me. But the other presence feels me thinking that, too.

Terian’s laugh rises.
I could tell you such stories about your new friend! Do you know what he used to like to do for fun?

Images start to coalesce, movies that start once I focus directly on them. They draw me in, until I want to see, until I cannot help but look. I feel Revik there, and I know a part of my fascination comes from him. He and Terian stand in a cell-like room with no windows or furniture. On the floor sprawls a young girl with blond hair and inhuman, gold eyes, a beautiful face and Revik is watching her, his own eyes hard, calculating.

The predator is there, but he lives in silver light—

A jarring contact met my head and back. I gasped.

Pain brought the physical world into focus.

Staring down at me is Revik’s sweaty face. His eyes are still glass shards, but the silver light is gone, and the predator is, too. Fear lives in his face instead, faint but visible. I realized then, where we were...where I was. He’d laid me roughly on the hood of the GTX.

My back hit the protruding air vent on top, snapping me out, hard enough that I wondered if he’d done it on purpose.

Either way, the pain yanked me away from Terian’s mind.

I struggled to sit up as Revik walked to the rear of the car, opening the trunk with the keys and pulling out a black gym bag filled with something heavy. He reached inside the driver’s side window to unlock the door.

“Allie!” he said, jerking it open. “Now!”

I rolled over the top of the hood to the passenger side while he leaned over and opened my door from the inside. By the time I got in, he was already ripping open the black nylon bag, and it struck me that the line of cars behind us had resumed honking.

I watched Revik jam the key into the ignition, holding a gun against the steering wheel.

“Put on your seat belt!” he said.

I fumbled with the strap as the GTX’s engine rumbled to life, but I couldn’t quite work it with the handcuffs. Revik put the car in gear. Then a voice emerged above the sound of the car’s motor. It took me a second to realize it was real...that it wasn’t his, or something from inside the Barrier.

“What in the name of Mary’s tits...”

Jerking my head around, I forgot the seat belt and crouched down, looking past Revik and up through the driver’s side window. Two cops stood there. Behind them, a black and white slanted down the bank beside the fisherman’s truck.

The cop who’d spoken stared at the gun in Revik’s hand.

“You got balls, buddy,” the second cop said, unholstering his sidearm. He raised the gun, aiming it at Revik’s face. “Now toss it out the window. Real slow.”

“Sleep,” Revik said. “Now.”

Both cops collapsed on the onramp without emitting a sound.

I sucked in a breath, shocked at the clean indifference of the act.

The one holding the gun wasn’t much older than me.

I didn’t have time to think about that, either, though. In the rearview mirror, I saw movement in the space by the fisherman’s truck. I turned my head right as another policeman emerged.

My voice burst out of me.

“Revik!” I yelled.

The third cop pulled his sidearm. I saw the brown eyes flash silver as he raised the gun.

“Seer!” I yelled.

“I know,” Revik growled.

His hand clamped roughly around the back of my neck, forcing me down past the bottom of the seat and under the windows. He took his foot off the brake in the same instant and the car lurched forward as the cop squeezed off his first round.

The sound of the shot seemed to come late, a second after the soft plink as the bullet went through the rear driver’s side window. I turned my head, staring at the hole in the upholstery until Revik shoved me down even further on the seat.

I crouched on the mat when I heard the GTX’s engine roar back to life.

I sat on the floor as Revik threw the car into reverse, slamming into the truck behind us. By then he had aimed the handgun and fired at cop number three. He hit him in the chest on the second shot, knocking him backwards into the police car so that the man’s arm and shoulder broke the passenger side window.

The cop’s partner emerged, firing wildly.

Screams erupted on the street.

I peered over the edge of the window, watched people run and duck in fear, eyes wide, and for a moment, I see them through Revik’s eyes, a flock of birds scattering...then Revik swiveled the gun towards the fourth cop, narrowly missing the man’s head.

He stepped on the gas...

But his foot slipped.

The engine’s rev faded.

Bewildered, I looked up, then saw Revik slumped in the seat as the car continued to roll. I froze, seeing his eyes glaze as the car veered towards the edge of the road. I threw myself up and into his lap, hauling the wheel to the left with my cuffed hands, trying to get my foot down to his, to keep the car from stalling, or worse, careening off the onramp and down that weed-choked slope onto the street below...

...when just as suddenly, he was back.

I felt it just before he raised his head, jerking back into life.

The gun rested on his thigh, pointed at his feet from where he’d slumped in the cloth seat. He stared at my handcuffs in front of him where I gripped the steering wheel, blinking at them as if he didn’t know what they were. When I looked back at his face, his eyes narrowed on mine, and for an instant I saw the predator there again.

“Revik!” I screamed. “Snap out of it!”

His eyes clicked abruptly into focus.

Reaching around me, he caught hold of the wheel, gripping the gun where it had loosed in his fingers. Without looking over, he moved one arm long enough to push me out of his lap.

He returned to the Barrier as he did it, and either I am too close, or something else drags me right along after him...

REVIK HEARS TERIAN’S laugh before he locates him among the metallic bodies.

Terian throws another cluster-fuck of silver, spinning lights at Revik’s head once he does, a Barrier structure that makes the orange sleeper Revik lobbed at me earlier look like a blown kiss. Revik makes his energy flush with the background and disappears, something he can do even with a part of himself operating on the ground, and I wonder where I am, if I am with him in this space...but he melts sideways and reappears, too late for Terian to redirect.

The silver spinners disappear into the empty nothingness of Barrier space.

I’ll kill her,
Revik tells Terian.

No,
Terian says.
You won’t. That’s the beauty with you, Dehgoies. By the end of this, we will have not only her, but you as well. You’re only a half-step from falling willingly, my friend. We can be brothers again...

Revik focuses on me.

He knows I am with him, somehow, but he can’t see me here—

You will help us train her,
Terian says to him.
Breaking in newbies was a particular talent of yours, as I recall. Especially the females...

Terian sees Revik starting to withdraw and calls after him.

...I will let you have her, my brother!

In that heartbeat of Revik’s hesitation, Terian lobs another cluster...this time of images, sensations. In it, Revik sees my body under his, our lights merging as I open to him. It is a mirage, a lie, but it catches both of us off-guard and briefly he is forced to untangle it.

He snaps the connection and is met with...
separation pain,
he calls it...that nausea I’ve been feeling with him, what I struggled with just that morning. Unlike with me, the feeling is familiar to him, though, something he understands. But with me, it bothers him more, creates a resonance with some younger version of himself, a place and time he wishes to forget.

Anger briefly suffuses his light, then reason.

He’s let it go too long, he thinks.

He will remedy that, in Seattle.

At the thought, heat flushes his belly, a flicker of sensual memory. I glimpse bare skin, a seductive smile, and this time it has nothing to do with me...

The Rook laughs.
You lie, Revi’! I know you...even if your clan friends do not! I see how empty this new life of yours is!
Terian’s smile turns friendly, and Revik recognizes that too; I feel the part of him that succumbs to that pull.

She will be my gift to you! Do you think your clan elders would offer you such a prize? Access to their precious Bridge? Do you, Revi’?

There is only the barest pause before Revik makes his light disappear, but Terian’s laugh follows him out of their connection.

I saw you thinking about it, brother! I saw you!

The clouds fade as Revik wills himself back.

Back to the car, back to me.

I SAW HIM come out of it.

Crouched on the floorboards of the GTX, I watched him warily, wondering how much of what I’d just seen and heard really happened.

My handcuffed wrists rested on the seat in front of me. I watched his face as he fired out the window again, his light focused on his targets. I heard the crash of breaking glass, felt him hit something he’d aimed for, wondered why he wasn’t driving away. Even as I thought it, he slammed his foot on the gas, his hand holding the gun falling to the manual gear shift.